Divinity Atlas
Three Continents Independently Built Divination on Powers of Two
Four divination systems, developed on three continents with no contact between most of the pairs, each settled on a set of figures sized to a power of two. Nobody agreed on this in advance.
Eight, Sixteen, Thirty Two, Sixty Four
The eight trigrams of Chinese divination combine three broken or unbroken lines, two to the third power. Geomancy, ilm al raml, the science of the sand, developed in the medieval Arab world and carried into Europe, works from sixteen figures built of four rows of dots, two to the fourth. West African and diaspora tradition holds thirty two named figures, split evenly into sixteen Ifa signs and sixteen Diloggun signs read with cowrie shells, two to the fifth divided into even halves. The I Ching carries the pattern to its limit: the eight trigrams combine in pairs to give sixty four hexagrams, two to the sixth, with the complete map of how each one can turn into any other individually recorded.
A Kinship the Record Refuses to Assume
These systems are not presented as descended from one another. Where a link between two of them has actually been proposed, the Arabic geomantic tradition and the West African odu tradition, the atlas records no connection at all, leaving the question of contact open rather than assumed. The shared arithmetic looks like a single idea spreading. It may instead be what happens whenever a system of divination is built by successively splitting a set of signs in two.